Services Marketing

Chapter 22 : Service Quality

Definitions of Quality and its Significance
Measuring Service Quality
Service Quality Gap Model
Service Quality Standards
Benchmarking
Total Quality Management
Strategies for Improving Service Quality
Monitoring Service Quality

Chapter Summary

According to Philip B. Crosby, "Quality is conformance to requirements." However, service organizations should strive to enhance the quality of their service to exceed customers' expectations, so as to stay ahead of competitors. Quality is also defined from different perspectives like user-based approach, product-based approach, operations-based approach, value-based approach and transcendent view.

Improving service quality enables organizations to win credibility, enhance customer satisfaction, obtain repeat customers and even charge a premium price. To measure the quality of service offered, service organizations have to measure both the technical and functional components of the service. According to a research conducted by Zeithaml, Berry and Parasuraman, five important dimensions of service (as viewed by customers) that need to be evaluated are tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy.

There can be many reasons for the differences between the quality expected by the customer and the quality delivered by the organization. Organizations need to establish certain service standards so that all the employees, as a team, strive to achieve them, and offer superior quality service to customers. Service organizations can use techniques like TQM and benchmarking to improve their service quality.

Striving to offer reliable service and implementing effective service recovery methods are some of the strategies used by service organizations to improve service quality. Apart from using quality management techniques and strategies, a service organization should continually monitor its service quality to ensure that customers consistently receive the level of quality service that they expect from the organization.

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